Meirav Jones

In the late eighteenth century, Johann David Michaelis criticized Moses Mendelssohn for bringing what Michaelis termed his native Jewish tradition into his thinking on universal matters. Yet leaning on Jewish sources had been a key feature of European natural law thinking from the onset of modernity. In this article, the author reads Mendelssohn's natural law theory as conversant with early modern legal thought that was scrutinized in the enlightenment, shedding new light on Mendelssohn's innovations and on what Mendelssohn was up against when he offered natural law foundations for toleration. The author finds that arguments for and against toleration of the Jews from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth were tied to the question of whether Judaism contained universal laws or laws particular to the Jews, and suggests that Mendelssohn's approach, while rejected from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, may be newly relevant today.

In his autobiography, Thomas Hobbes stated that he wrote his most influential work of political theory, Leviathan, to “absolve the divine laws” in response to “atrocious crimes being attributed to the commands of God.” This article attempts to take Hobbes seriously, and to read Leviathan as a contribution to the religious politics of the English Civil War. I demonstrate Hobbes’ appropriation of the religious terms and sources characterizing civil-war political discourse, and explore these terms and sources both in Hobbes’ response to religiously motivated politics and in the foundations of his most important political ideas. Hobbes emerges from this account as a critic of Christian politics and enthusiasm broadly conceived, as a political philosopher who employed an Israelite political model, and as an erstwhile ally of some of those usually considered his deepest opponents.

The paper offers a rabbinic conception of political space as possibly opening up new ways of thinking beyond the Westphalian paradigm that approaches "otherness" with partition or marginalization.  המאמר מציע תפיסת מרחב רבנית שיכולה לפתוח אופקים חדשים לחשיבה פוליטית-מרחבית מעבר לפרדיגמה המוכרת של המדינה המערבית המודרנית, שמותירה אותנו בין האפשרויות של חלוקה או הדרה.

This article participates in efforts by IR theorists to clarify aspects of modern sovereignty – an idea currently in rupture and being rethought – by returning to its founding ‘Westphalian moment’. While recent work has reconnected modern sovereignty to religion, considering Westphalia as a religious settlement and Christian concerns persisting in the groundwork of IR, our work looks beyond Christian concerns and asks how Westphalian sovereignty addressed non-Christians. We trace a yet-untapped discussion of the Jews – presented as a paradigmatic religious ‘other’ – among architects of Westphalian sovereignty from Bodin through Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. We demonstrate that foundational theorists of modern sovereignty considered religious diversity a political problem. Some cited essential sameness, minimising difference between Jews and Christians. Others considered the possibility of Jewish sovereignty long before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern consciousness. While the discussion of Jewish sovereignty among architects of modern sovereignty may seem to justify a Jewish state in a world of Westphalian states, it also emphasises Westphalia’s territorialising of religious difference. This aspect of the Westphalian framework is surely inadequate today, when territorialising religious difference is neither normative nor likely possible.

In his autobiography, Thomas Hobbes stated that he wrote his most influential work of political theory, Leviathan, to “absolve the divine laws” in response to “atrocious crimes being attributed to the commands of God.” This paper attempts to take Hobbes seriously, and to read Leviathan as his contribution to the religious politics of the English Civil War.  I demonstrate Hobbes’ appropriation of the religious terms and sources characterizing civil-war political discourse, and explore these terms and sources both in Hobbes’ response to religiously-motivated politics and in the foundations of his most important political ideas. Hobbes emerges from this account as a critic of Christian politics and enthusiasm broadly conceived, as a political philosopher who employed an Israelite political model, and as an erstwhile ally of some of those usually considered his deepest opponents. His work as portrayed here might provide insights for political philosophers writing in theological political climates.